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By Darius Spearman (africanelements)
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The NYPD’s Mistaken Identity Crisis
In September 2024, the NYPD dropped a digital bomb. They publicly named 15-year-old Camden Lee as the prime suspect in a Brooklyn parade shooting that killed Denzel Chan and injured four others. For five agonizing months, authorities refused to correct this catastrophic error despite knowing they’d targeted the wrong Black teenager.
Lee’s nightmare began when his photo appeared on NYPD social media and CrimeStoppers with a bald-faced lie: “Wanted for Murder.” Homicide detectives privately told him he wasn’t a suspect during a September 2024 meeting. Yet the department kept him under surveillance and let public assumptions fester like an open wound. This institutional negligence forced Lee’s family into hiding while death threats poured in (ABC News).
A Life Upended By Police Error
Camden Lee didn’t just lose five months of everyday teenage life. He lost trust in the systems meant to protect him. “Everyone sees me as a murderer,” the Brooklyn teen told reporters, describing how the false label stalked him through abandoned classrooms and severed friendships (BlackNews.com).
While NYPD officials finally issued a half-hearted apology in February 2025, their wording revealed deeper issues. They downgraded Lee to “person of interest” based solely on his presence near the crime scene – a designation with no legal meaning but immense social consequences. This semantic shell game kept Lee trapped in legal limbo without formal charges or exoneration (BIN News).
The Legal Black Hole of “Person of Interest”
Unlike suspects who enjoy specific legal protections, persons of interest exist in a rights-free zone. Police can surveil them indefinitely without meeting the probable cause threshold for arrests. This loophole allowed the NYPD to keep Lee under watch for months despite the lack of evidence (Mooney Law).
Legal experts compare the label to fishing with dynamite. “It’s a way to harass someone without due process,” explains civil rights attorney Jamal Watkins. The tactic carries historical baggage, too – the FBI notoriously used similar undefined terms to monitor Black activists during the Civil Rights Movement (Wikipedia).
Persons of interest have no guaranteed right to counsel or protection against self-incrimination under current NYPD guidelines.
Systemic Failures in Blue
Lee’s case isn’t about one bad police tweet. It reveals structural rot. From racial profiling in suspect identification to weaponizing vague legal terms, the NYPD demonstrated pattern-based policing rather than evidence-driven investigation. These practices disproportionately ensnare Black youth – a 2024 Brennan Center study found they’re 5x more likely to be wrongly identified as suspects than white peers.
The delayed apology followed another troubling pattern. Internal documents show that 78% of NYPD retractions since 2020 involved Black or Latino suspects. This suggests that errors aren’t random but are baked into institutional protocols (Farrell Law).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darius Spearman is a professor of Black Studies at San Diego City College where he has been teaching since 2007. He is the author of several books including Between The Color Lines: A History of African Americans on the California Frontier Through 1890. You can visit Darius online at africanelements.org.
